


Jump

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Forced Prostitution, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Possible Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-17 19:36:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12372600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: It’s a Reaping Day twenty-six years later—a day no one marks, but Raylan still knows, the Reaping wrapped like chicken wire around his soul—that the rebellion storms the Capitol, that explosions rain down from the sky and Raylan lifts his gun and – “Will you kill me, Raylan Givens?” Boyd asks, blood on his teeth and dynamite in his hands.





	Jump

**Author's Note:**

> So you’ve all encountered The Hunger Games and thought, “Mines? Death? That would be a perfect world for a Justified AU!” (You haven’t? Really? I’m astounded. Just flabbergasted.) But of course the problem is that either one of them would have to be female, or one of them would have to not be reaped, or they’d have to be from different districts (all of which work, of course, but wasn’t what I was going for)–but not if it’s the 2nd quarter quell, Haymitch’s quell, where there were two boys and two girls from each district! … and so I wrote my usual time leaping disconnected nonsense. Heed the warnings in the tags.

It all starts on Reaping Day.

Everything does. It’s a Reaping Day nineteen years before that Frances’s name isn’t drawn from the bowl—her seventh and final Reaping Day, the escort’s cry of “Missy Mulroney” that saves her life—and, in a fit of effervescent, unbridled _life_ , she makes the unwise decision to let Arlo Givens walk her home.

“And so we separate the wheat from the chaff,” Boyd says—mumbles, because even Boyd Crowder isn’t fool enough to speak out during the Reaping so the peacekeepers can hear. “The same blood harvest every year.”

It’s a Reaping Day twenty-six years later—a day no one marks, but Raylan still knows, the Reaping wrapped like chicken wire around his soul—that the rebellion storms the Capitol, that explosions rain down from the sky and Raylan lifts his gun and – “Will you kill me, Raylan Givens?” Boyd asks, blood on his teeth and dynamite in his hands. And he’s calm, where Raylan’s hands are shaking, he’s reaching out the same way he turned to Raylan a quarter century before and said, _Jump_.

Raylan had jumped.

 _Shoot_ , Boyd says, and it’s Raylan who fires the gun.

“I hate dressing up for the gallows,” Raylan complains, both of them thirteen and his name already in the bowl eight times, tugging at the tie wound too tight around his thin neck. “Them and their stupid fucking cameras.”

District 12’s escort beams down on them, his tie ruffled, purple as a bruise, his lips a waxy blood red. _May the odds be ever in your favor!_ he cries, and Raylan wants to leap onto the dais and strangle the man with his garish tie, wants to take his bitten nails to the man's throat where all the cameras can see.

“Why, Raylan,” Boyd says, shuffles closer than need be. Raylan wonders how many times Boyd’s name is in the bowl, with Bo in lock up again and no way to get by besides signing up for tessarae. Six times? Ten? “We ain’t dressing up for _them_.”

“No?” Raylan asks, side eyes Boyd with his eyebrow raised, doesn’t dare look him full on when the cameras are only a swivel shimmy away from catching them both in their beady black gaze.

“No,” Boyd answers, his pointy elbow digging into Raylan’s ribs. _Ladies first_ , the escort says, reaches into the bowl with a sanguine smile, and the cameras turn in time to catch Dottie Mosley’s first ugly sob. “We are dressing for the introduction to our deepest fears,” Boyd whispers, near impossible to hear over Dottie’s undignified screams. “We are dressing up to meet our truest selves.”

 _We’re dressing up for Death_ , Raylan thinks, and doesn’t notice that he’s caught the hem of Boyd’s fine Reaping shirt between his fingers until Shim Dawson’s name is called and he remembers to breathe.

 _Quarter quells are all about exceptions_ , everyone in the Capitol says, even while they pretend that Raylan’s games had one victor instead of two. _What would the Games be without a twist?_

 _Jump_ , Boyd says, and it’s Raylan who grabs Boyd’s hand when they leap.

Bowman’s reaped the year after. He’s sixteen by then and larger than a Seam boy has any right to be, vicious and strong and prepared to kill. It’s Raylan’s first year as a mentor.

He should have expected Bowman—Boyd obviously did, doesn’t even show up to the Reaping to take his rightful place on the dais—but Raylan is still surprised when the escort reads _Bowman Crowder_ off the flimsy scrap of paper in his hands. No one cries for Bowman as he walks toward the stage. Bo’s sleeping it off in gaol and Hannie had died before they’d made it home on the Victory train and Boyd’s nowhere to be seen, not on the dais and not in the crowd and not in the empty house in Victor’s Village with dust thick on the furniture and no sheets on the bed.

It’s Raylan’s first year as a mentor, but he has no advice to give. _Trust no one_ , he says to both tributes, and Bowman snorts like Raylan’s both stupid and lying, and Raylan looks at Bowman and sees his darker, scrawnier brother stretching out his arms and saying _Jump_ , thinks of the wind rushing by his ears and tearing his lips back in a grin when they did.

Raylan and Boyd (and Verra and Elspet, dressed up for the cameras and already dead even while they board the train in front of Raylan) have no mentors. There are no victors in District 12.

Siles Givens, Arlo’s daddy, tells Raylan stories of a Twelve who won the Games, once, back in the First Days after the rebellion was lost. Raylan’s granddaddy says it was before the cameras. Before the richest districts understood they could break the rules and train their tributes and play a different kind of Game. Siles says the girl won, and the first President came to crown her, and the Victor used her bloodied fingernails to rip out the President’s throat, licked at the blood on her hands and grinned as the peacekeepers mowed her down.

 _Rebellion never dies, boy_ , Siles says, shaking a gnarled finger at Raylan, his hands scarred and arthritic after years scraping a living out of the mines, stops to cough soot out of his lungs. _You remember that. Fingernails grow even on a corpse._

 _Ignore that old man_ , Raylan’s mama shushes him when he wakes up with nightmares, thinking of dead girls with long, twisted fingernails reaching for his throat. _There ain’t no rebellion here_. She closes his window as she says it, though it’s deep into summer and Raylan’s aching for the barest hint of a breeze, shuts the curtains and stands by the window looking out at nothing until long after Raylan falls back asleep.

Siles Givens dies before Raylan’s first Reaping when the house he’s visiting caves in, killing Raylan’s granddaddy and five other men he knew from the mines. Just an old men’s poker game, the peacekeepers say, and Raylan doesn't understand how that could be when Siles always preferred to play poker outdoors at the Hob. The peacekeepers burn the rubble until no bodies are left behind, no corpses to bury and wait for their fingernails to claw them free of their graves.

 _Every quarter quell is different_ , President Snow announces gravely, the little yellow envelope already in his hands, the beard he grew last year giving him another layer of gravitas. A way to hide his jowls, Boyd hisses, a way to hide how the harvest makes him fat. Everyone in the Seam goes to the town square for mandatory viewing, all of them there staring obediently at Snow’s red lips and beady gaze under the peacekeepers’ watchful eyes. _This year, there will be four tributes drawn from each district. Two boys and two girls. This is to remind the districts that for each Capitol citizen killed in the fighting, two rebels died._

Bowman’s partner—the merchant girl from Clover Hill, the first tribute Raylan fails as a mentor, the first of so many that Raylan pretends he can't even recall their names—doesn’t last five minutes into the Games. She starts sobbing as soon as they put her on the platform, spit and snot and tears dripping down her blotchy face, screaming for her mama and pissing herself before the countdown gets to one. District One does his fellow tributes and all the viewers a favor and cracks her neck, the snap of her vertebrae the gunshot that sends the others racing for the Cornucopia or for escape.

There’s no escaping the Games. Bowman lasts until the third day. Longer than Raylan expects him to, once he realizes the glass bowl brimming with names must have had _Bowman Crowder_ stenciled onto every slip. Longer than President Snow means him to, certainly. He kills the entire pack of careers, not as clever as his brother but at least as ruthless and three times as strong. Snow has to send in a different, Capitol pack to mow Bowman down; Boyd's little brother strangles two of the strange reptilian hounds before they get him, blood under his nails and venom dripping from the mutts' pointed teeth.

Raylan sits in the mentors’ viewing room, surrounded by Victors and Capitol citizens wealthy enough to buy a front-row seat. He watches the venom sizzle as it eats into Bowman’s skin and wonders how long it took Hannie Crowder to die, wonders if they waited to kill her until he and Boyd had boarded the train home.

He wonders what they would have done to Frances Givens if she hadn’t already been dead.

“I ain’t going back,” he swears, the second year, the only one boarding the train home to Twelve, Bowman and the girl lingering absent in every car, the sound of Raylan’s footsteps erased by the thick rugs, his fingerprints wiped off the glass and his broken mirror swept away before he can face himself in the shards.

“You want your new mama laid out next to your old one?” Boyd hisses, drags his rough fingernails over Raylan’s narrow hips and bites hard enough to draw blood at the juncture of Raylan’s thigh, Raylan arching off the luxurious Victor’s bed with no sheets, choking on the dust they dislodge.

“Don’t call her that,” he snaps, slides his fingers through Boyd’s dark hair and yanks, shoves Boyd’s mouth onto his dick to shut him up, doesn’t flinch when Boyd refuses to put away his teeth.

Boyd’s teeth are all new, unstained and straight from the Capitol, replacements installed because what good was a Victor with a crooked, caved-in grin? District Two had won a sword from the Cornucopia, had used the pommel to stave in Boyd's mouth and silence him once and for all.

It hadn’t worked. If dressing up for Death every year couldn’t shut Boyd Crowder up, Raylan suspected nothing would.

Three days later, Raylan gets the first of the letters summoning him to the Capitol. He has citizens _eager_ to make his acquaintance, the letter says. Simply _dying_ to meet him. The letter doesn’t say that they’ve paid for him, that he’s been reaped and butchered and bought and sold and shipped in an empty car like so much freight, raw as the mangled meat that was all of Bowman the mutts left.

“Why didn’t they send for you, too?” Raylan demands, when Boyd walks in on him crouched in the palatial shower in the house where neither of them live, surrounded by empty bottles of Capitol soap and delicate slices of fresh sponge, hot water stinging his scoured skin and blood under his nails and just as dirty as he was hours, days, weeks before. “Why was it just me?”

Boyd doesn’t come any closer. He slouches in the doorway, his hands in the pockets of his slacks, unfazed by Raylan’s nakedness or his brother’s death or the blood on his own hands. Boyd had wrapped his shattered mouth around the hilt of Two’s sword and shoved, used his cracked jaw to drive the sword right through the girl’s belly and out the other side.

“I had a talk with Snow,” he says, doesn’t flinch when Raylan hurls soap bottles and epithets at his unscarred face. “We decided you’re the Victor the world really wants to see.”

Raylan claws Boyd bloody, carves furrows into his chest, forces him down and _takes_ , the way everything was taken from Raylan. The way Boyd allowed it to be. He tries to take it back for himself, but all he’s left with at the end is a scream building in his chest and Boyd’s blood under his shredded nails.

It’s years before Raylan remembers the weeks Boyd went missing their first year back home, the way he vanished one night and showed up months later, haggard and unsmiling, hairless and smooth and unscarred. _Raylan_ , he whispers, appears like a mirage in Raylan’s enormous bed, in the Victor’s house they’d won. _Raylan, I’m sorry. I’m sorry_. Boyd had gone and come back hairless and unspeaking and they’d pulled Bowman Crowder’s name out of the bowl.

 _I’m sorry you lived_ , Boyd whispers, and Raylan doesn’t understand.

“Whose side are you on?” Raylan asks, his hand on a weapon and Boyd’s hand on a fuse and smoke billowing acrid and sooty around them, the smell of burning plastic and charred meat, no different an arena than it was twenty-five years before.

“Does it matter?” Boyd replies, and he could be a man long grown or he could be eighteen and sewn into the black body suit Verra had scowled at and called a shroud, holding a bomb and spitting blood and broken teeth with a dangerous grin.

They call Raylan’s name first—third, after Verra and Elspet, four children because every quarter quell must break new bones—and it’s as if the escort is shouting into the glass bowl, _Raylan Givens_ muffled and echoing and far away. The other boys shove him toward the stage, and he stumbles forward to the sound of Arlo’s cackling laughter, his fingers still clutching a torn bit of Boyd’s best shirt.

Everything’s silent except the throb of his pulse in his ears, the clicking of his jaw as he tries to swallow without any spit. Then the escort reaches in and pulls out Boyd’s name—says it _Boyd Crow-der_ , and _yes_ , Raylan thinks, the sound rushing back into his world, yes, Boyd is the boy who crows, Boyd is black feathers and black eyes and blood on his beak and in his smile—and Boyd rejoins his torn shirt tail on the stage, the crumpled white strip in Raylan’s hand like a slip of paper with Boyd Crowder’s name.

 _At least we’ll never have to work in the mines_ , Boyd declares into the silence of the train, and Elspet throws her china dinner plate at Boyd’s head. There’s no one alive to mentor them, and Boyd’s comment about the mines is the only solace they get.

 _I had a talk with Snow_ , Boyd confesses, the year that Raylan learns the only thing worse than the mines is the Game and the only thing worse than the Game is staying alive; and all Raylan hears is betrayal, sees Boyd hiring Arlo and making deals with Snow and never thinks of Hannie Crowder dying while the Capitol forged a second crown, her fingernails growing sharp in her grave.

 _Jump_ , Boyd says, and there’s no way to survive the fall, and Raylan takes Boyd’s hand and leaps, stretches out his arms and denies the Capitol a Victory that year, two rebels dead for every citizen and five four three two now none of them shall remain.

The hovercraft operators catch them in mid-air, haul them into the belly of the ship and come at them with gauze and syringes and gloves. Raylan doesn’t let go of Boyd’s hand until they drag him away—but the gamemakers cut the film short that year, because two dead boys holding hands isn’t the kind of story the Capitol wants to sell.

The Capitol doesn’t want to sell two Victors at all, and so Boyd sells out and they take Raylan.

Maybe.

 _Shoot_ , Boyd says, and Raylan pulls the trigger without thinking, leaps to his death without pause.

Maybe that’s how it goes.

 _Will you kill me, Raylan Givens?_ Boyd wonders, smiling with a mouth full of Capitol teeth, blood on his hands and blood in Raylan’s mouth and nothing between them but smoke, the ashes of a dusty bed in an empty house in a district razed to the ground. Raylan’s dressed up and it’s Reaping Day and maybe this is how it ends, the Capitol on fire and two of them dead for every one.

 _I’m sorry_ , Raylan says, Boyd’s shirt in his clenched hand, hears that girl’s screaming, spineless sobs echo through twenty-four games before a boy breaks her neck, the booming death knell that sets all Raylan’s tributes free.

 _Raylan,_ Boyd says, hisses Raylan’s name in the dark of the arena, and Raylan doesn’t know if Boyd means to make him an ally or his next kill; he whispers Raylan’s name when they’re both naked on the bathroom floor, raw and fucked and ruined and pretending that it’s blood and not tears pooling on Boyd’s skinny chest; he shouts it when District 6 gets Boyd at knife point and Raylan would have to reveal himself to make the kill, forces Raylan to choose between surviving one more day or saving Boyd’s life.

Boyd murmurs Raylan’s name like they could be something soft when Raylan comes home every year for the Reaping, regretting every dirty, sooty second of his time in Twelve and always finding his way into the same unused bed. Boyd never buys sheets. When Raylan complains, Boyd smooths one hand over the years of blood and come and sweat on the ruined mattress, peers at Raylan with a crow's eyes _. What's left of us, besides this_ _?_ he wonders. _What hasn't been burned away?_

They’re the only ones left. Raylan can kill Boyd and listen for the cannon, collect his winnings and never have to sign up for more tesserae to cover his daddy’s lack. All he has to do is reach out and push Boyd off the cliff.

 _We dress up to meet our truest selves_ , Boyd tells him, both of them choking to death in their only clean suits, still too young to shave, then, hairless and unscarred.

Maybe this is how it ends, Raylan thinks, and he reaches for Boyd’s hand.

**Author's Note:**

> In this strange disconnected universe, the girl on fire is, of course, Loretta McCready.


End file.
